DIY Super Sonico Headphones

If you’re like me, you just get a kick out of making things yourself. Sure, I could have paid a minimum of $15.99 (+$6.99 shipping and handling for a total of like $24 dollars plus 1-3 weeks of hounding the mailman) for premade Super Sonico headphones, but where’s the fun in that?! As someone who has been cosplaying for a couple years now, I have accumulated a pretty impressive stock of art and crafting supplies, and I try to put them to use when I can. In the case of making Super Sonico’s iconic headphones, I used

Crayola Airdry Clay

Craft Wire

Cardboard

$5 Over the Ear Headphones

Acrylic Paint

Plastidip

Fuckton of glitter

Hot glue

Mod podge

A straw and a pencil or pen of roughly same circumference

I swear it’s not as much as it looks like 😅Moving on to step one!

First, I used the clay to make those weird little stacked cylinder pieces. You’ll need to make two of each. I freehanded mine and they came out well! Once you have them sculpted to your liking, uses the pen/pencil to poke a 1/2 inch hole into the center of each one. To speed up the drying time, I popped them into the oven for like 10-15 minutes at 250 degrees Fahrenheit. If there are tiny cracks, it’s no big deal! Mod Podge and Plastidip and are gonna cover them up entirely. Once they’re dry, they should look something like this:

After the cylinder pieces cooled, I used my trusty glue gun to attach them to my headphones. You wanna use a healthy amount of glue and press the pieces into place. It’s fine is some of the glue seeps out a bit, as shown in the picture. Once everything is painted, it won’t be noticeable.

Next I added the little antenna pieces! That’s where the straw came in. I cut off two pieces of straw at the desired length, then used hot glue to insert and secure the pieces of straw into the holes I made in the cylinder pieces. See?

Next, I used my cardboard and glue gun to make two tiny rectangular boxes. Then, I measured and cut two pieces of craft wire and attached them to the boxes. After that, I glued the box/wire contraption to my headphones. Here’s a pic for clarity since that probably wouldn’t make much sense without a solid reference pic:

Moving on, I sprayed down the entire thing in black plastidip to seal and prime it for painting. Easy stuff.

Once the plastidip was completely dry, it was time to paint. I handpainted it with some basic gray acrylic because I didn’t feel like going to Walmart for spray paint ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But I quickly realized I wasn’t feeling how dull it looked, even with the added shimmer of extra glossy mod podge. Although the paint job wasn’t totally done in this pic, you can tell that lackluster gray wasn’t gonna cut it.

That’s when I remembered that glitter exists. Canonically, Super Sonico’s headphones aren’t glittery, but I’ve never been afraid to tweak a design a little! Cosplay is about creativity and innovation, right? So I frantically dusted my full grey headphones with silver glitter while my mod podge was still wet. Then I let it all dry, and went over my glitter with more mod podge to smooth out the texture and seal the the glitter in place so that it wouldn’t transfer to my wig or anything else it touched. I was left with this poppin’ shimmery goodness!

Finally, I tested them out with a quick selfie session! They were relatively lightweight and sturdy, and the glitter looked really good in the light. Overall, the only thing I had to buy to make these were the headphones, which I got for $5. Everything else, I already had on hand! Much cheaper in the long run, plus I got to bomb the shit out of them with glitter, which is always great.

I’ll probably make another pair using metallic silver spray paint at some point, but I love the glittery ones I was able to create ^_^